Fractured Faith

My recent email exchange with Dear Husband contained quite a few bombshells.

One of the most shocking items was DH's revelation that he recently left the Catholic church.

"The Church has given me no solace. I see no point in going anymore. My faith is lost and I am searching for something different," DH wrote in his email.

I'm not sure about many things, but I was pretty certain DH would be a faithful Catholic his entire life. It isn't just that until recently, he never missed a weekly mass except when he was at sea with the navy. It's that in his family, the pressure to be devout could fracture rock.

Take, for example, our wedding. DH applied for an annulment from his marriage to First Wife three years before our wedding, but the church didn't get around to processing the paperwork in that time.

So we had an outdoor heathen wedding. His parents and four of his six siblings did not attend. Two responded negatively to the invitation and one sent a nauseatingly self-righteous letter, but the others didn't even bother to return the rsvp cards. Clearly, DH's family's devotion to the church eclipses blood ties, compassion, and even good manners.

My own feelings about the church are multifaceted and overwhelmingly negative. The picture above hints at one of my problems with the church. It still blows me away that a group of people who claim to love God and one another could sacrifice generations of children merely to maintain the status quo.

I also have issues with the church's archaic position on reproductive healthcare. I realize its stance dates back to the time when you needed to have 12 kids to have two reach adulthood and take over the farm, but times have changed. Since the church just got around about 15 years ago to forgiving Galileo for daring to say the earth was round, I figure they may need a few more years to work out the birth control issue. Let's hope they get cracking before too long.

My personal grudge against the church dates back about about 75 years (I know, I know, my mother says I need to learn to let things go). My grandmother converted to Catholicism to marry my grandfather in the early 1930s. She put up with about 12 years of drunken beatings before filing for divorce. A few years later she married another devout Catholic, chosen no doubt for the fact that he was unlikely to hit her.

Because she didn't get her first marriage annulled, my grandmother was unable to take communion after she remarried. Yet she went to mass faithfully every week for the next 50 years or so and was denied the most sacred ritual of her faith merely because she had the nerve to divorce an alcoholic wifebeater.

So clearly I'm not crazy about the Catholic church. I argued with DH sporadically about his religion, I questioned his intelligence and sometimes his sanity for continuing to attend through revelations about the church's shameful handling of its pedophile priests, but I never tried to interfere with his attendance at mass.

Now he's spiritually adrift. I have to wonder how firmly he was anchored to his faith in the first place - I'm not sure that lying and cheating are at the top of the list of Christian virtues - but the church leaders haven't displayed the highest integrity themselves, so maybe his role models weren't the greatest.

I probably should have known better than to marry someone who gets to confess away his sins and be forgiven every week. As a heathen, I have no choice but to live with the aftermath of my actions.